8 definitions
by
Wind

On internet message boards and blogs, with growing concern for political correctness, people feel compelled to refer to any unknown or anonymous entity as "he or she" or "he/she" etc.

In response to this, people who have a distaste for political correctness have coined the term s/h/it, pronounced just as it looks. It stands for she/he/it, cleverly taking a disdainable situation and turning it on it's ear.

Tabletop RPGs (also called Pen-and-Paper RPGs) are roleplaying games in which a person takes on the role of a fictional character, as supervised by a game leader, often called the GM or DM (game master and dungeon master, respectively). Most of the time, it is for the purpose of playing out fantasy adventures, such as slaying demons or rescuing princesses.

Tabletop RPGs focus on combat, and often contain volume after volume of books which explain and expand upon rules, and add optional features as well.

Tabletop RPGs tend to have a medieval-setting, but include classical fantasy monsters such as dragons, and paranormal events such as spells and magic. Most tabletop RPGs are based in Tolkein lore, including the presense of elves, dwarves and hobbits.

Typically, when playing a tabletop RPG, you'll design your character in terms of their race, class and special abilities.

Racial choice (human, elf, gnome, etc.) usually sets the tone for your characters behavior. Dwarves are obnoxious and beer-crazy, elves are haughty and frivilous, and so on. Racial choice also often affects your statistics, such as how much damage you deal, how fast you can move, and so on.

Character class is basically their profession, though it is, again, combat-oriented. You won't see a Farmer class, but you'll often see archetypes such as Warrior, Mage and Theif.

Special abilities are those outside of race and class choice. They are optional abilities which either modify the way your character behaves in combat, or adds some stastical augmentation. In D&D, these are Feats and Skills. In Vampire: The Masquerade, this is tantamount to your Clan.

While the popular cliché would depict players of tabletop RPGs as losers and social outcasts, due to the most recent crop of fantasy-based major motion pictures, more and more demographics enjoy this passtime. This is made easier by the internet, as people can play in relative anonymity and across the globe.

Dungeons and Dragons is, perhaps, the most famous of all tabletop RPGs.

ChMe, which is short for Chaito Meale or "Warrior Spirit," is a fledgling Tabletop RPG which is unique in that it is not based on Tolkien lore, and there is no spellcasting or magic system, both of which are aspects found in almost every other tabletop RPG ever devised.

It was developed between 2000 Summer and 2003 Winter, which is the only known fact about the game other than the rules themselves. ChMe appears in the form of twenty-seven pages of plain text, handwritten neatly (some suggest by a woman), which divulge the core mechanics and rules of the system, but do not include supplements such as monster or equipment description. The last three pages seem detached from the rest, and possibly incomplete, as they discuss some campaign setting and briefly explain the origins of the system. The original pages have never been circulated, only copies have.

It has escaped internet scrutiny due to multiple facts...
•It is passed around by word of mouth and pink-colored xerox copies, and no other method.
•It is unprofessional, meaning it was not devised by a company.
•The person or persons who created the system remain thus-far anonymous, resulting in two phenomenon. Firstly, multiple people claiming ownership. Secondly, every time it is played and passed on, those who participated change it just a little bit, so it is ever-evolving and useless to catalouge.

The twenty-seven page ChMe guide has a printed footnote on every page that reads, "Please do not mass-distribute, alter or sell the afforementioned. The Creator(s) of this system will not now, nor ever reveal their identity." with "Are You Living in the Real world?" superimposed by means of what one can only assume as the original xeroxing of the doccuments.

"In ChMe, if your character possesses the Superfluous Speed aspect, it can assume double it's Initiative Parameter in place of the normal IP + d10 at the begining of any round of combat."